Salience, Risky Choices and Gender

Salience and Asset Prices

In Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer (2012a)— henceforth, BGS (2012a)—we described a new approach to choice under risk that we called salience theory. In comparisons of risky lotteries, we argued, individuals’ attention is drawn to those payoffs which are most different or salient relative to the average. In making choices, individuals overweight these salient payoffs relative to their objective...

Temporal Discounting Predicts Risk Sensitivity in Rhesus Macaques

Humans and animals tend both to avoid uncertainty and to prefer immediate over future rewards. The comorbidity of psychiatric disorders such as impulsivity, problem gambling, and addiction suggests that a common mechanism may underlie risk sensitivity and temporal discounting. Nonetheless, the precise relationship between these two traits remains largely unknown. To examine whether risk sensiti...

Does the Ability to Make a New Business Need More Risky Choices during Decisions? Evidences for the Neurocognitive Basis of Entrepreneurship

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People and animals often demonstrate strong attraction or aversion to options with uncertain or risky rewards, yet the neural substrate of subjective risk preferences has rarely been investigated. Here we show that monkeys systematically preferred the risky target in a visual gambling task in which they chose between two targets offering the same mean reward but differing in reward uncertainty....

Gender differences in the willingness to engage in risky behavior: a terror management perspective.

Two studies examined the effects of mortality salience inductions on men and women's willingness to engage in risk-taking behaviors. In Study 1, a sample of American college students (N= 101) were exposed to either a mortality salient or a control condition and then rated their willingness to engage in a variety of risk-taking activities. In Study 2, a sample of Israeli high-school students (N ...